Steve Jobs Speaks From Wild Blue Yonder About eVTOLs, Vaporware and His Reality Distortion Field

“Reality Distortion Field does not apply to aircraft”

Opinion and distorted reality by Howard Leventhal, Editor and Publisher, Aviation Newswire (https://flightwire.us) and VTOLView.com

#evtol #aviationindustry #aviation #aerospace #drones #flighttraining #flightsafety #flyingcars #uberelevate #uberair #elonmusk #tesla #military #devops #siliconvalley #afwerx

PALO ALTO, CA – September 14, 2020 – Noted tech bon vivant and dead person Steve Jobs spoke at a séance conducted at dawn on San Francisco Bay here today, opining about the “mature” eVTOL market. Noted for among other things, creating perhaps the greatest capitalist enterprise ever conceived on Planet Earth, Jobs noted “My Reality Distortion Field does not and cannot apply to any sort of aircraft, especially if you want it to fly.”

Jobs continued “I logged onto LinkedIn under my usual alias and read some recent commentary about nay-sayers and Luddites[1] having the nerve to question whether or not there will ever be a commercially viable eVTOL industry. Some doofus wrote the following and I just couldn’t stop myself from commenting.”

‘I find it interesting that as soon as a new industry matures, a lot of papers and articles pop up, along with experts out of nowhere. It seems to me to be more about exposure than anything else. The EV phase went through the same. At first, it was dismissed, then mocked, then attacked, then embraced. I think we are in between mocked and attacked in the electric aviation. We're in the "Let's see how we can cash in on this new thingy we're late to" :)’

“Firstly” Jobs continued “let’s examine the definition of ‘mature industry.’ Who in the bloody heck ever applied this term to any field of endeavor yet to generate its first dollar in ongoing revenue from operations? None that I can see from here and let me tell ya, I can see plenty from where I am now.”

“Secondly, let’s define ‘late.’ Late is when you start a company to make Beanie Babies twenty years after they’re being given away free at McDonalds. Late is when you stop at the pharmacy to buy birth control after your date has gone home. Late is when you introduce five thousand pound automobiles with 12 cylinder gasoline engines in the 21st century. Late is not five to six years before the first government-approved anything has yet to operate a single time in commercial service. Late is not when one – and only one – variation of the design you plan to use has ever operated regularly – as in the Osprey VTOL.”

As the candles and incense neared the end of their own lives, Jobs continued. “My Reality Distortion Field[2] operated perfectly in the computer hardware and software business for at least one good reason: Almost any digital problem can be overcome by thinking through it. Workarounds. Back doors. Hacks. Algorithms arising from intuitive leaps. In other words, a totally abstract world with no physical form at all until after the code is written. None of this can possibly apply to aerodynamics or aeronautical engineering.”

“All aircraft involve manipulation of physically-existing substances like air, airfoils, lifting bodies and stuff like that. Immutable laws of physics are involved. Lift, drag, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, weather, etc. You know, the physical sciences. While we … oops I mean you … may currently live in a world where science is discounted, there is no such discounting possible when engineering any aircraft.”

“And speaking of discounting, let’s talk about discounting the amount of money it has taken to successfully commercialize even ‘cheap’ aircraft over the last 20 years. Cirrus’ Vision Jet is little more than a prop-driven SR20 on steroids with a jet engine strapped to it. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Vision Jet, Cirrus sold itself to China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co. (CAIGA), because Cirrus, an established, respected company with real cashflow from selling real, certificated aircraft could not produce enough cash to continue development of even a not-so-radical new aircraft."

"So Bunky, if you're in the business of developing a radically new lifting body in the form of an eVTOL for example ... can you really say that you are more capable than (or even equally capable as) all the engineers at Cirrus or Airbus for example? I only ask this cuz if you cannot say that, maybe you might consider a different approach to your field of endeavor" said Jobs.

Vaporware Revisited

“What I see in the eVTOL field” said Jobs, “is an enormous number of companies selling, or trying to sell vaporware. It is little different than the computer industry over the five years leading up to the Dotcom Crash of 2000. Why? Just like then, otherwise bright rich people are doing what some folks I know refer to as ‘groin investing.’ If they see a story that causes an autonomic response by their endocrine system, they write a check. Whether or not they understand what they’re seeing or have any hope of understanding. Its vaporware syndrome all over again.”

“What’s more” Jobs continued “Much of the time – and I’m not sayin’ all the time by any means – what’s really driving investment is fees to lawyers, accountants, investment bankers and $250,000 salaries for founders along with a leased Tesla. Whether or not there will ever be any product has little or nothing to do with it.”

“Calamity is coming in this ‘mature’ industry. By calamity, what I mean is large, heavy objects on fire falling out of the sky onto schoolyards and bonfires of cash better spent on COVID cures and PPE. There are plenty of souls keeping me company up here in the Wild Blue Yonder. We don’t really need any more and your kids will thank you for refraining from burning their college funds. What is needed is a great deal more technology due diligence and market research. Do you really think everyday folks will part with $150 to save themselves some time in terrestrial traffic? Prove it. Show me a scientifically conducted survey of opinions for example. For gosh sakes.” Said Jobs.

“Nolan Bushnell had a real engineer, Alan Alcorn, with a successful track record and clearly able to render the Atari game and Pong into real, functional devices. I had another guy named Steve to help me. Mature guys, with stomachs hanging over their pants, gray hair and basements that smelled like old socks and would make great technology museums. Much more of these types of people, with real aviation backgrounds are needed in the eVTOL industry or vaporware, museum pieces and depleted bank accounts will be the only things ever be produced.”

As the candles burned down, the sun rose in the sky and the incense aroma subsided, Steve Jobs looked wistfully at the horizon and said “Flying taxicabs you say? I wish I was there.”

So do we.

And then he was gone.

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Howard Leventhal is a Subject Matter Expert in Digital Forensics, Aviation Artificial Intelligence, Financial and Digital Fraud Detection. Mr. Leventhal is a writer, futurist and FAA-licensed pilot with 550 hours logged (not so many). He holds a U.S. patent in data encryption and is fluent in Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML). Leventhal styles himself as a subject matter expert in the synthesis, combination and hybridization of human and artificial intelligence aircraft piloting. He is a pixel-level master digital artist and document authenticity analyst in files created with Abobe Creative Suite applications including Photoshop, Acrobat Pro, Illustrator and Premiere. Howard is currently getting up to speed as a developer on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine VR world builder. He has studied Sun Tzu’s Art of War for decades and has been an internationally certified black belt instructor in traditional ITF-style Taekwon-do for (way too many) years, so if you disagree with him, do it from a distance ;). Presently Howard is re-enrolled in college (Class of Methuselah[3]) on a course of study toward creating, developing and publishing the first global reference standard curricula for eVTOL flight training and flight instructor training. See https://vtolview.com and https://flightwire.com for information about outsourced technical and financial due diligence for aviation-related projects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson-ebook/dp/B004W2UBYW

[3] Methuselah was an Old Testament character believed to have lived 969 years.